WinGate
8.4.2.4814

4.0 (87 votes)

(July 23, 2015)

Windows (All) /
Shareware; $74.95 /
24,280 downloads

WinGate is a sophisticated internet access control gateway and communications server designed to meet the control, security and communications needs of today's Internet-connected businesses.WinGate's comprehensive range of license options provides you the flexibility to choose the features and capabilities that best match your needs and budget, whether you need to manage an enterprise, small business, or home network.

Sure you can get a proxy going on linux. Even intercepting one with squid + iptables. If you have a couple years.

But WinGate is a lot more than just a proxy. There's a heap more it can do. I think the previous reviewer never can have looked at 7 at all.

The new policy system is simply awesome. Drag and drop your own decisions. I been waiting for something like this for years (literally - WG6 was 2004)... now I get total control over my policy, plus I see how people get through it (path highlighting) and can close it down. Can set different reject messages depending on what you reject on.

Dashboards are another amazing new feature. You can set up switches which control things in policy - like turn on and off auth or scanning or whatever with a click. Can set permissions on dashboard so I can let my manager see some things and click some buttons but not mess with my config. I haven't played with it heaps but it's pretty cool - even get glass effect on meters, and a dinky 14 segment emulated display.

The other cool thing is the timeline. It shows you a real time moving bar-graph of sites people are on (and for how long). You can scroll back in time to see who was on what site when and for how long (and how much data)... like real time report with history.

Still looking through a bunch but this is first impressions, which is that this is HOT!

Wingate does two things that no cheapo router I've ever seen can do: real-time detailed reports of all traffic, and full NAT while still taking advantage of a proxy cache. Its also just about the only way to share a dial-up connection, which is all that many of us can get (don't even mention XP's Internet Connection Sharing..*gag*). The documentation could be better and some functions are rather cryptic to configure (access policies come to mind). But its still the best software routing solution that I've come across, and I've tried most of them.